This is an incomplete list of steem voting bots with a brief description and a personal rating. It will be broken up into 3 categories: paid bots (e.g. randowhale), bid bots (e.g. drotto), and free bots (e.g. originalworks). Paid bots are bots where you pay a specific value and you will get a roughly predetermine value upvoted to your post, for instance pay 1SBD to get a 1.35 SBD return vote. Bid bots work very similarly except it works more of if you buy a vote by paying, you can get much larger votes when timed correctly, votes are not predetermine to much if any degree. Free bots are bots that upvote you with no cost to yourself (except potentially some bandwidth) but they may serve a secondary purpose sch as originalworks which can be use to signify the originality of a post. This post will not deal with bots like cheeta as I have no idea on how cheeta specifically upvotes, I do know it follows specific people and downvotes them though. This will also ignore certain things like certain curation bots (steemstem, curie) as they work by following curators to upvote good content, what I am looking at are bots that will upvote more than just specific realms of content. I will be including qurator on this list as, although it is a niche curration bot, it upvotes automatically. Lets get into it. Warning this post uses he/she interchangeably as bots (programs) tend not to not have genders, if this offends you then feel free to reply but realize that I am just using it because its easier for me to refer to bots like that over referring to "it". Ratings are arbitrary and made up by me, if you want a proper grading using a rubric then create one but many bots are so different that it would be extremely difficult to rate them on a single scale.
@randowhale
Randowhale is known by many as a great tool and service, and also a horrible thing that promotes spam content. Many dislike randowhale and the complete idea behind it due to their disposition towards his creator (@burniesanders) but he is truly one of the original upvote bots and definitely the most well known. For a while randowhale worked by you sending him 2SBD and he would upvote a post at the same value plus some and you would generally get what you paid for back exactly (if not slightly less) but he worked. Now you can pay in batches of 0.5SBD up to 5SBD (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, ... , 4.5, 5.0) and you will get a vote proportional to what you paid with a chance of getting a bonus amount added (ike say paying 5SBD and getting a 12SBD upvote instead) which is nice. Whether you love or hate bernie (he doesn't care) you have most likely seen someone benefit from the service he provides steemit.
Ratings: 5/5
@steemlike
So I have a bias towards steemlike which is that I get paid around 0.1 SBD every day from this account due to my delegation to it. Now lets get past that and talk about how steemlike works, first you pay them a value between 0.1SBD and 6SBD and you get an upvote equal to ~240% what you paid so if you pay 6SBD then you will get a ~14.4 SBD upvote. This is subject to change at their own choice. Why I truly like this bot is that it has a website that you can look at to determine the status of your upvote (pending complete, etc) and if you get a refund it will say why. The upvotes are a little bit slower than other bots but they also have more rules about the exact content they upvote. The website for the bot is located here and provides multiple accounts that will upvote you (@steemlike, @steemfunding, @parosai, @koinbot).
Rating: 4.7/5
@minnowpond
Minnowpond is a bot that used to (it might still) provide free votes for all whom follow it but provided much larger votes for those whom paid. A vote wold cost 0.25 SBD or 1.25 SBD for a larger vote but also provide a resteem service for 0.75 SBD. What this means is that following minnowpond lead to a large amount of crap posts in your feed as it would resteem anything. The votes were less likely to go negative when compared to randowhale (randowhale would upvote at 1.06 SBD and after curation would provide around 0.795 SBD value at a cost of 1SBD, thus negative) but its votes were small. That being said, they had some problems with their track record of posts not getting upvoted or resteemed. Although they have a discord channel, their help was quite unresponsive and lead to many stating it was a scam thogh once they update the bot it started to work again.
Rating: 2.3/5
@randofish
Randofish is another upvote bot whee you pay 0.25SBD and recieve an upvote between 20% and 80% or 100% if you pay 1SBD. Now as you can see, randofish is at a reputation of 0 ever since berniesanders (and his account army) decided to kill randofish since randofish was using randowhale as advertising. However, randofish still seems to upvote people and provide its service.
Rating: 3.5/5
Bid Bots
Bid bots work much differently from basic pay-per-vote bots and can even work differently fro each other. The basic idea of a bid bot is that a bunch of people send SBD to the bot and whomever sent the most gets the highest vote out of the bot and whomever votes the least gets the lowest vote. The defined maximum and minimum vote can differ exponentially depending on what the creator decides. What this means is you can bid higher than the bot can upvote or you could bid low and get a very large upvote. Some state that the reason that they use bidbots isn't even for the upvote value but rather for the reputation they gain from a whale upvoting their content. So lets get into some of the bid bots:
Dr Otto Avatar
@drotto
Dr. Otto is a bidbot that will upvote you between 0% and 3.13% every 270 seconds. He has a maximum upvote of 1.49 SBD but maximum bid upvote (at 3.13%) of 0.05SBD making him a bidbod for minnows. Now you may know of Dr. Otto from the minnow support project as the MSP account will actually call Dr. Otto when you use their upvote. He has low value and is meant for minnows but he still provides a service to the community.
Rating: 4.5/5
@upgoater
No longer a bidbot and may become a dormant bot very very soon. If anyone has more information feel free to add it here
@lovejuice
Before researching this topic, I didn't know about lovejuice. Lovejuice is a bot that was inititally made to flag steemit "circle-jerk" content and was turned into a bidbot after HF19 and can upvote at a max of around 20SBD. The other thing about lovejuice is its an erotic bot. Because of that no pictures will be provided so that I can keep this out of NSFW. I do not know enough about love juice to provide a meaningful rating but there is a minimum bid of 0.1SBD so yeah.
@Booster
Booster is a bot that splits its vote proportional to how much you voted compared to everyone else. So if you payed 50% of the total amount sent to booster within a bid period then you get 50% booster vote. A max booster vote (100, 100) is roughly 140.78SBD but it is unlikely that you will get the max.
More Bid Bots
These are bidbots that I either didn't know enough about or else are new.
@litasio
@boostme
There are more bidbots but if I were to go through every bot in each list this would be a very very long list since anyone can create a bot.
Free Bots (May Require Initial Fee)
These are bots that give you a free upvote (ignoring sign up fee) that can act as a boost to your reward. The value tends to be small for these bots and some might provide a secondary service.
@originalworks
Original works is a bot that will upvote a post at 1.5% if determined to be original, otherwise will provide a warning that the content is similar. I believe the bot is still WIP but it can still be a tool used to attempt to prove authenticity. Sometimes the bot responds super fast and at peak hours the bot can take hours to respond if it does at all.
@minnowsupport
This bot has a fee of 0.002 STEEM to register and it upvotes a post anywhere between 0.36SBD and 0.4SBD (including the votes of those whom trail the account) as well as it calls Dr Otto. The bot allows minnows to get a small amount of support (and it truly does help minnows) so whether you are a red fish or a minnow you could always use an extra few cents. There are other benefits than just that and the other benefits are the community thatdoesn't require registration.
@qurator
Qrator is a bot that will upvote 1 post of a registered author every day at between 0.06SBD and 0.98SBD with a registration fee of 2SBD (meaning a T0 user would require about 34 posts in order to make their registration fee back) but by simple upvoting their posts yo can increase your tier. Qurator also comes with an exclusive upvote bot where you pay 1SBD and get an upvote on a post. The bot requires no work other than requesting to see if your account is posting material that stands up to their standard and if so then you can easily join. So the goal of qurator is to offer more benefits to unique content on steemit.
Advertising
With all this talk of bots I decided to talk about a bot that I am working on, just in case there is anyone that doesn't know about it yet. @steemstem-bot is a specialized trailing bot that will trail behind @steemstem and will upvote content (free of charge) at around 0.01SBD. The goal is to have the bot build up enough SP so that it can make a difference and eventually upvote greater than 0.01SBD. Once an accurate model is present on the number of average upvotes being given each day by steemstem it will calculate the minimum delegation required and then it will trail behind. The goal/plan of the bot may change in the future.
For a more indepth (older) post, go here
FYI
I am using each of these bots to upvote my post, then I am going to value each upvote I get and write a second post (after payout) about the return on investment from the bots. Some of the bots I overpaid (for rep) which is fine by me. I will make a second post that will state the amount made versus the amount spent to give people an idea for which bots they want for rep and which are for profit.
Kryzsec's Steemit Board
